Articles Tagged with Fortisphere

Many enterprises have found that as long as proper principles are used in the design of the virtualization platform that management of most of the applications that have been virtualized to date, can easily be accomplished by having the VMware administrator leverage the ever growing feature set of VMware vCenter Server (formerly known a Virtual Center). It is true the the feature set of the VMware platform (everything in blue below) combined with Virtual Center is the market leading virtualization platform from the perspectives of market share, functionality, and scale/performance.

Every vendor of a virtualization platform (VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, Red Hat) also offers at least one and in some cases a suite of virtualization management tools. VMware and Red Hat only support their own platforms in their tools. Microsoft offers limited support for VMWare in System Center Virtual Machine Manager, primarily with the intent of making it easy to migrate a VMware VM from the VMware platform to the Microsoft Hyper-V platfrom. Citrix supports both its own Xen platform and the Microsoft Hyper-V platform in its Essentials product.

As virtualization matures, great progress is being made towards the goal of allowing performance sensitive applications to run on virtualized platforms. The performance and scalability gains delivered by VMware vSphere are a huge step in this direction. Other good steps in this direction are:

vApp from VMware which allows a multi-server application to be encapsulated in one OVF file and managed as an entity.

On June 22 2009, Dynamic Ops announced VRM 3.2 the latest release in its cross-platform enterprise scale virtualization management offering. VRM has always provided a high level of self-service allowing constituents other than the VMware vCenter adminustratir to create their own guests per policies set in place by IT.

I was in this industry when the IBM PC was launched in the early 1980’s. As soon as the first model was replaced with one that had a 5 MB (imagine that) hard disk, and the first personal productivity applications came out (WordPerfect, VisiCalc, and Harvard Graphics) the IBM PC morphed from a toy to a serious tool that users and businesses could use to enhance their productivity through computing without having to plead for resources and support from what was then a mainframe and mini-computer dominated data center.